


1001 Arcadian Nights

by JustinianAugustus



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Light BDSM, One Shot Collection, Selfcest, marxism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:46:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 2,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24366016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustinianAugustus/pseuds/JustinianAugustus
Summary: A collection of one-shots on the many possible loves of Max Caulfield... from the fluffy to the raunchy, from the serious to the absurd.
Relationships: Max Caulfield/Chloe Price, Max Caulfield/Kate Marsh, Max Caulfield/Rachel Amber, Max Caulfield/Stella Hill, Max Caulfield/Victoria Chase, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Juliet Watson, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Mark Jefferson, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Maxine "Max" Caulfield, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Taylor Christensen
Comments: 13
Kudos: 55





	1. Max/Victoria

“What the fuck Victoria!”

Victoria had been in one of those hypnagogic morning states when the outburst came, and immediately the anonymous splotches in her vision coalesced into Courtney and Taylor and an open doorway. Why in god’s name did they come in here? Oh well, she knew she couldn’t keep up her late-night liaisons without eventually being caught. Might as well happen now.

“Can you guys get out of my room?” Max grumbled from behind her, groggy but forceful. The two intruders looked like they had just discovered their favorite Italian restaurant wasn’t really in the food business, and made no objections to Max’s request.  
Max reached around Victoria and gently held up her bedmate’s arm to look at her watch, which was worth more than some cars. A family heirloom.  
“Seriously? Seven AM on a weekend? Why are they even up?”

Victoria remembered the first Friday night (or was it Saturday morning already?) when she waltzed into Max’s room hammered and asked if she could sleep over, how novel it felt to wake up wrapped in Max’s fuzzy pink comforter instead of her usual silk. Now it was like a routine. And it was annoying when someone broke your routine.

Letting go of her arm, Max sunk back into the darkest recess of the bed against the wall and brought the sheets almost over her head.

“Mmmmm come back here. Don’t get up.”

Victoria had been leaning forward in shock at the sudden appearance of her friends, but she was in no mood to leave Max behind. Dutifully she snuggled up to Max again, her spot still warm from the past night, and let Max drape herself around her.

Within an hour tops the whole school would know about this, but her entire social life collapsing catastrophically overhead was a trivial price next to dozing in the arms of Maxine Caulfield, the cutest art hoe in this godforsaken state. In fact, she’d throw out all the designer nightwear in the world for the flush of Max’s cheap cotton shirts against her shoulders and the way she looked all hazy and unkempt in the morning before her makeup (and the fact that she actually pretended she didn’t wear makeup despite those big, beautiful, shadowed eyes).

No, the world could be ending outside and it would still be easy to fall back asleep with Max cuddling her.


	2. Max/Rachel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More like Max/Heroin

A golden liquid glowered from the syringe in Rachel’s hand. For the third time Max objected, but the feel of Rachel’s fingers on the soft side of her arm almost masked the pinprick. The hi-fi helped too. Max wasn’t into dadrock but even she could recognize The Velvet Underground.

And then Rachel was administering herself, tourniquette in her teeth like a real cop-show junkie. As if the smattering of little red stars and smudgy egg-yolk bruises along the bend of her arm weren’t proof enough.

There was no bond quite like sharing needles.

Waiting. Every time she tried a new drug, there was this disbelief before it took effect — an irrational idea that it would fizzle out and do nothing. You’d just lie there like an idiot waiting forever.

Max remembered seeing a chart on the internet once showing dopamine levels with different stimuli. Good food, sex, pot, cocaine, all clustered together. Then off above, in a class of its own — _Whoa_.

There we go. The darkness gradually became acute, highlighting the circles of starlight cast on the ceiling by Rachel’s bedside lamp. Max was suddenly very aware of the evening breeze from the open window, the way it smelled like cut grass and cicada songs. Then Rachel was muttering something smooth.

But Max was already lost, swaddled in perfect equanimity. From somewhere a million miles away — no, that was an understatement — from somewhere on the other side of the universe, red-shifted, Lou Reed’s voice narrated her thoughts. _It’s my wife, and it’s my life_.

To think she had actually hesitated! Forty thousand pinpricks with all their pain couldn’t touch the peace of mind that stopper had unleashed. Rachel had been carrying the answer to human frailty, which priests and philosophers had debated for millennia, in a box under her bed between mothballs and magazines. What self-exile from truth Max’s whole life seemed in hindsight! She realized, now, that the greatest and most inhuman myth was that love was zero-sum. She had infinite love to give, to Chloe, to Rachel, to Victoria and Principal Wells… if Nathan had walked in right then, she would have hugged him and apologized for this lifetime of misunderstanding. With this divinity in her blood she could love everybody and everything with equal largesse.

Tranquility boiled through her skin. She was treading water now. Her breaths tremored and spat in the cold. So soft, barely a whisper. Maybe they’d stop outright, and resume in a billion years when all her pieces fell together again.  
 _Heroin… be the death of me_.


	3. Max/Stella

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously, in the entire history of AO3 nobody has written Max/Stella before?

A spectre was haunting Blackwell.

They said that to be a good Marxist you had to read a bunch of books, paratexts, marginalia, ‘ _learnéd commentaries_ ’ from long-dead theorists...  
Max thought that was a bunch of bullshit. The best way to spread the Immortal Science was to get dirt on your fingers and blood on your knuckles. And sometimes lipstick in a few funny places.

“Okay, I think we’re going to have to test this first because I’m not sure it’ll work with these magazines,” said Stella, tinkering over the rifle they’d stolen to illegally modify.

“You’re doing awesome,” Max encouraged. What was it Godard said? _All you need is a girl and a gun_.

“I’m still torn on the Mao-Hoxha question honestly,” Stella mused to nobody in particular.

“Hey, I didn’t take polisci. We just read _Animal Farm_ in Hoida’s class.”

Almost instinctively Stella recoiled.

“Orwell was a traitor to the revolution just like Gorbachev. He fought against the fascists in Spain but became another decadent bourgeoisie hack. That reminds me…”  
She produced a marker and began writing along the stock of the rifle. _This… machine… kills…_

She didn’t start with enough space so the slogan came out rather crumpled, but Max supposed the writing on the side wasn’t where people would be looking when Red Halloween came.

And it wasn’t where Max was looking anymore either. There was something really cute about Stella when she was fixated on a project like this, getting to work toward what she believed in.

It was the same allure that made Max start going to Stella’s ‘leftist book club’ in the first place, listening to her talk about dialectical materialism and how they could attract more members (could some sort of Cornel West ‘Christian socialism’ bullshit work on Kate? Was it possible to turn a Professional-Managerial princess like Victoria Chase?). Max felt kind of guilty over the fact that through all the discussion, important as it was, she’d be preoccupied by what Stella looked like with her glasses off or whether she put the water on before the toothpaste or how much she tossed and turned at night or whether she liked listening to music during sex.

Max was slowly finding out all the answers, even if it took a revolution.


	4. Max/Taylor

Romances always began with the weather. Low bulkheads of fog sloughing off the hills out to sea, each swivel of the lighthouse revealing the dark fissures that roiled over the bay and up out of view. 

Taylor’s window framed the whole town, and with the sash jammed up Max could just see the winking neon of Two Whales Diner.

“Want another hit?”

“Sure thing,” Max answered, fencing Taylor’s fingers to grab the joint she had rolled earlier. She sucked in, the smoke livening her soul, and then blew out into the mist.  
“Fucking criminal that you guys on this side get such an awesome view.”

Taylor laughed and folded her arms on Max’s shoulder.  
“Hey, it gives me an excuse to have visitors.”

“You act like it’s a chore. You know I love you…”  
Max squeezed her in camaraderie, setting Taylor giggling again.

She hadn’t meant anything by it, but Taylor was too stoned to care about authorial intent. Brushing aside Max’s hair and pressing her lips against her neck was downright Barthesian.


	5. Max/Chloe

The ‘hints’ phase was ancient history. Granted, Chloe had always been the one sending them out, but Max never missed a beat in leaning into an innuendo. She was virginal, emotionally isolated, and more than anything, hungry.

This wasn’t to say Max was with Chloe out of desperation. Quite the opposite — the mutual strength of their attraction pulled Max out of the ascetic quicksand she had been sinking in.

Max was no Rachel. Yet still, Chloe couldn’t shake the feeling that unless she tread carefully she could find Max too in the arms of a Frank, writing letters never sent. The first mistake Chloe wasn’t going to repeat was the tenuous ‘friends with benefits’ twilight zone which had colored the Rachel years. No, this was official, and she wasn’t going to let Max slip through the cracks on technicalities and misunderstandings. She was Max’s, and more importantly, Max was hers.

Was that the real reason why Max was currently lying face down in her bed with strips of torn flannel binding her hands and feet to the posts?

Maybe? Did it matter?  
God, she was the biggest hipster ever using fucking flannel instead of handcuffs, which Chloe could have easily swiped from Step Führer.  
It was so cute it almost made her want to go easy on Max. But Max didn’t like it when she went easy, and part of being in a relationship was accommodation.


	6. Max/Jefferson

“My selfies are shit… I need to be framed by a real artist. I’m just a poser.”

There was nothing more relieving than finally admitting to yourself that thing you’d always buried, like an alcoholic starting their recovery. The tealights, the plaid, the imported vinyls, every coy laugh and twee smile… it was all smoke and mirrors. Even her immaculate bangs were a fraud.  
Max Caulfield was a fucking poser.

“Chloe can never appreciate you the way I will, Maxine. And yes, I insist on calling you ‘Maxine’... forever.”

He was right. Max didn’t need her anymore. Everybody was just a side-show in a two-person opera. Mark could be her friend, her father, her lover, her teacher, her confidant, her confessional… and there was nothing sexier than the way ‘ _Maxine_ ’ rolled off his tongue.

Passion via intravenous injection. The romance of cotton swabs and band-aids.

She wanted to hear him say her name as he caressed her, as she dragged her lips across his stubble, the smell of his aftershave lingering on her skin. Feel his hands over hers as he guided her fingers around a camera, showing her how it was really done. Shoot, wind, shoot, wind... celluloid and silver halide, not polaroid and Pabst. Real art, not pretension.


	7. Max/Kate

Kate hated steel teapots because by the time you went to pour your cup the handle was always too hot to touch. She learned why in chemistry years ago. Something about ‘specific heat’?

They were, however, undeniably elegant looking.

She had finally agreed to try Max’s poison — Monkey-Picked Oolong — out of boredom with the usual Earl Grey and English Breakfast, in addition to a healthy curiosity about what exactly an ‘Oolong’ was and whether the monkeys left any lasting impression on the taste. Max warned her that teabags would compromise the blend, so she’d have to drink the old fashioned way with leaves scuttling around the bottom of each cup.

Kate stared into the cycling water with the intensity of a fortune teller.  
“It’s funny, the leaves kinda look like weed,” she observed.

“I wouldn’t know. Not a big pothead.”

Kate looked scandalized.  
“I mean, me neither, of course, I’ve just seen — you know, you see these girls around here who keep it in their rooms.”

Max patted Kate’s sweatered forearm.  
“Yeah, I wasn’t implying… It was just a joke, I know exactly what you meant.”

Kate smiled in her usual preoccupied manner, but it was enough to ease the tension as Max poured water into her own cup and set the teapot aside. She brought the porcelain up to her lips and inhaled the fragrance.

“Nothing better than the smell of fresh tea.”

Kate was too distracted by the sight of those thin pink clouds straddling the rim to register what Max said. Without thinking, she dared a sip from her own cup.

It was like woodsmoke and old socks. Those monkeys must have had terrible taste.

“So, what do you think?”  
Max was grinning ear to ear, not waiting for an answer before she took another sip of her own. The liquid hung on her bottom lip, leaving a sheen that Kate wished she could touch.

“Oh, it’s wonderful, Max!”


	8. Max/Max

“Why are you such a shy loser?”

“Why are you such a bitch?”

The real question was, why did they go through this kabuki theatre every time? They both knew what they wanted.  
Only the cruel and confident Max had the guts to start them off... she could push Max’s buttons so well. With surgical precision she made each insecurity a plaything, turned everything Max said back on itself. It was torturous, but deep down Max liked it, and her nightmare twin teased her about that too. How fucked up she was under all the demure tinsel.  
When she was feeling particularly mean, she’d make Max fucking _beg_ for it.

“I bet if people actually cared about you, you wouldn’t have to come to me. Wouldn’t that be the life.”

“Chloe loves me. Kate’s my friend. So is Dana.”

“Wow, three whole people. You think because Chloe fucks you she loves you? Hey, I guess that means you love me!”

“You’re nothing compared to Chloe.”

“Exactly. We’re a bauble for her to bounce around before she settles with someone actually in her league. Face it sista, you don’t deserve anything beyond the dugout.”

The Max of her nightmares didn’t look any different outwardly — she was flat as an ironing board, lanky, had the same sick pallor from spending her days over a laptop — but there was a fire in her eyes and deliberation in her movements that advertised her dominance. Max could barely help to not whimper when she put her hands on her neck, signalling what she could do if she wanted. She could likewise barely help to not whimper when it came to doing that thing they _both_ wanted.

“God you’re ugly. Remember that time you tried coming onto Frank to get his keys and he just totally shut you down? Even that sleazebag pedo? That was hilarious.”

“You don’t seem to think so when I’ve got my head between your legs.”

“Think about how pathetic it is that the only person who actually wants to fuck you in the long term is yourself.”


	9. Max/Juliet

“So you really want to be in the fall play? You never struck me as the type.”

“I want to try something different.”

“Hmm. At least you took the time to find out I was the casting director. Come sit with me.”

Max had been puzzled why Juliet had an enormous leather couch in her room, and had elected to sit in a wooden desk chair, but at the invitation she figured she had to oblige.

“Marlowe’s _Doctor Faustus_ isn’t a play for dilettantes… there are only a few roles and you need serious chops for all of them. How about we start by practicing a little romance scene?”

“I don’t think there’s any romance in the play,” Max objected, “and I’ve got a monologue ready from _Cymbeline_.”

“Just for fun. Just as an experiment. You do want a role, don’t you?”

Max nodded apprehensively.

“Pretend you’re my Romeo.”

Max froze for a moment, unsure what exactly Juliet wanted her to do. She started awkwardly making doe eyes, chewing the scenery as a doting lover.

“Come on, if you’re going to get onstage in front of an audience you can’t be afraid to get intimate. Bring it in. Like this…”  
Juliet pulled Max against her chest and guided one of Max’s hands up to the side of her breast, leaning her face so close Max could see the foundation on her forehead and the slight gap in her left eyebrow.  
“Now show me how you’d treat your girlfriend.”

Oh. Why didn’t she just say that in the first place; that it was a fuck-for-your-role Harvey Weinstein kind of deal? Max was always baffled at how much of Blackwell’s Finest wanted to get in her pants, given their usual sidelining of her hipster-bookstores-and-lavender-chamomile-tea lifestyle.  
Girls like Juliet were easy to please. They were so used to clumsy jocks who didn’t understand the finer points of tonsil hockey that all it took was some liplock and second-base action to make them roll over. The poor sucker Victoria wasn’t going to know what hit her when Max scored the lead role despite all the petty favors she’d done for Juliet recently. Clearly it took a different kind of favor to win Juliet over.


End file.
